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Sindhis are an Indo-Aryan ethnolinguistic group who speak the Sindhi language and are native to the Sindh province of Pakistan. Besides Sindh the historical homeland of Sindhis are regions like Kacchi Plain, the Lasbela and Makran regions in Balochistan, the Bahawalpur region of Punjab, the Kutch region of Gujarat, and Jaisalmer and Barmer regions of Rajasthan, India. There are also many Sindhi Hindus and Sindhi Sikhs who migrated to India after partition in 1947.
Most Sindhi tribes, clans and surnames are a modified form of a patronymic and typically end with the suffix - ani, -ja/-jo, or -potra/-pota, which is used to denote descent from a common male ancestor. One explanation states that the -ani suffix is a Sindhi variant of "anshi", derived from the Sanskrit word "ansh", which means 'descended from'.
Sindhi people have many Sindhi communities which have many tribes and their clans ("nukh", "para" or "orakh" in Sindhi). Some major Sindhi communities are Sammas, Soomros, Jats, Sindhi mercantile communities (Memon, Shaikh, Khoja), Lohana (Bhaiband, Sahti, Amil), Sindhi Waniya, Arora, Sindhi fisherpeople (Mohana, Mallah, Med), Sindhi tribals/artisan tribes, and few Arab, Mughal, Turkic and African Sheedi communities.